Doing keyword research for B2B SaaS businesses might be tricky. Obviously, SaaS companies should build their SEO strategies around their brand name and their product category (e.g. “Appointment scheduling software”, “CRM software”, etc.).

However, Google processes almost 63,000 various search queries per second. Therefore, if your keyword list is tied to the name of your brand and product only, you may be suffering bad times. In order to match this great variety of requests as much as possible, you need to generate more ideas for keywords.

Keyword pyramid

The keyword pyramid describes various keyword categories that your prospects may use while searching for your products or services on the Internet. You may see how this pyramid looks like in the following diagram:

Keyword Pyramid

In a word, those keyword groups are commensurable with the stages of the SaaS sales funnel where leads have completely different intents. Thus, at the top of the pyramid lie the terms with the lowest search volume and with the highest purchase intent. The terms with a lower position, vice versa, have higher volume but little intent.

Steps to make the pyramid work

The keyword pyramid helps B2B SaaS companies find out which terms at various sales funnel stages can help them attract more leads to their brand. To make the pyramid work for your SaaS business, follow the steps described below.

1. Make a list of potential keywords for each category

Try to define potential keywords in each category of the pyramid. For example, if you work on the keyword research strategy for a CRM software, your list of potential terms may look like this:

• Solution terms: CRM software, Customer Relationship Management, Mobile CRM, CRM for Restaurants, etc.
• Integration terms: CRM for Outlook, CRM for LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Problem terms: Accurate sales forecasting for an IT company, Real-time reports for law firms.
• General terms: Automate sending follow ups to my clients, manage my client intake pipeline.

It’s better to keep the list of initial terms in order to keep track of them and add metrics like monthly searches, competitiveness, etc.

2. Choose a keyword research tool 

We dedicated one of our articles to various keyword research tools. Check them out by following this link and determine which suits you most of all.

Such tools help to identify the most profitable segments for your business as well as build and target the right audience.

For instance, if you use Ubersuggest, add to your spreadsheet the information like:

• Volume: the number of searches your keyword has a month;
• CPC: the price for the click if you want your SaaS business to rank higher in Google results. 
• SEO Difficulty: estimated competition in organic search. The higher the number, the more competitive your keyword is.
• Paid Difficulty: estimated competition in paid search. The higher the number, the more competitive your keyword is.

Ubersuggest keyword analysis board

While you’re analyzing your keywords in Ubersuggest, it’s also worth looking at the device types from which users performed searches. Additionally, you can record other useful information like keywords and content ideas.

3. Identify your keyword focus

Having built your list of keywords and recorded metrics that describe them, you can clearly see and determine where you should focus your efforts in building the SaaS keyword strategy. 

In order to prevent optimization of wrong keywords, don’t put too much effort into increasing such numbers as volume or decreasing keyword competition. 

Instead, define the terms for various stages of your sales funnel and estimate the value of traffic those keywords may bring. Then create a spreadsheet to model expected search volume, CTR, visits, sign-ups, customers, annual recurring revenue, etc. for each terms category in your keyword pyramid:

Approaches for each of the keyword categories

Brand terms

If your SaaS brand name is pretty well-known in people’s minds, you’ll rank high for your brand terms. When a person enters the name of a famous brand into a search bar, the search engines immediately show the company he is looking for. This stems from the fact that these companies have already acquired top positions in search results, and the engines have learned this. For example, if you enter “salesforce”, then your top results won’t contain just websites with the phrase “sales force”, or something else. Instead, the first thing that will be offered to you is the official Salesforce site – salesforce.com.

If your company is not so famous, you can try PPC ads to help you appear higher in search results. You can either delegate running paid ads to your in-house marketing team or find a trusted performance marketing agency to do everything for you and bring more awareness to your SaaS product.

Solution terms

Above all, you should define solution-specific keywords you’re going to use. Just do some keyword research to see not only the words and phrases with the highest search volume, but also which of them describe your product features best of all. 

Build landing pages or update existing ones

After defining the solution-specific keywords, you should make sure you have appropriate landing pages to target them. 

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Each page should be optimized for the solution term you have chosen and contain text, pictures, and customer testimonials on how your product is great to solve your prospects’ problems.

Build links to these pages

There exist two types of links for building your SaaS keyword strategy. Let’s consider both of them:

1. Internal links

Internal links are those that point from one page to another on your site.

Look through your website service pages, blogs, etc., and insert links to a certain page wherever it is possible. For example, let’s look at how Semrush did that in one of its articles:

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The article related to “content audit” where a visitor appears after clicking that hyperlink.

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2. External links

Unlike internal links, external ones lead to a page that belongs to another domain. 

The most popular and best way to get external links to your website is guest posting. Although they may seem time-consuming and depend on the resource authority, links received through guest posts can help you bring your product page to the top search results.

Integration terms

Integration terms describe those related to various possible integrations of your product with others. 

So, if your SaaS product can integrate with other software, you have a great chance to promote it using integration terms.

Let’s consider how you can work with them.

Add all possible integrations to the terms

Your integration term should consist of a solution your product represents and another product your potential customers may want to integrate with. 

A typical scheme for such terms can be like:

The main idea lies in targeting the right solution term.

Create relevant landing pages 

For each kind of your product integrations, you should have a related landing page.

Apart from information about the integration itself, the principle of its work, the steps to set it up, the landing page must contain a clear CTA.
Here’s a great example of how Cleo built their integration landing page:

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Obviously, Cleo’s page targets leads who are searching for “Salesforce for a cloud-based ecosystem integration platform” and contains everything that every ideal landing page should have. It includes an overview of Cleo’s features, the benefits of Cleo’s Salesforce integration, and multiple calls to watch a demo or to start integration.

Build link between your page and the integrating product one

Link-building to integration pages has its peculiarities. You can’t just acquire them from other bloggers or websites.

However, the only best place to get this link is the list of integrations on the website of the product your SaaS solution integrates with.

Alternative terms

In case your product has various alternatives, then your chances to rank higher in search results increase. Here’s an approach on how to do this effectively.

Look for the possible product alternatives

First of all, look for the alternatives your prospects might be looking for. Besides, as we mentioned above, use keyword research tools to discover the search volume, the competitiveness of those terms as well as determine how well your product can solve the problems your target audience may have.

Convince prospects that your SaaS product is the best

The way you position your SaaS brand is the #1 thing. Therefore, your landing pages shouldn’t just show the features of your product. They should make your leads think that your offering is the best one.

For instance, you can show on your landing page how your product, in comparison with your competitors’, can help potential customers cope with their problems. 

Here’s how Mouseflow created a convincing landing page:

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Leverage Google Ads

Sometimes, one of the best ways to work with alternative terms is to use Google ads to drive initial paid traffic to your website. This will allow you to gather the following important numbers which can bring your company to the top of search results and build an efficient keyword strategy:

• exact search volume which is often shown with a tolerance by third-party tools;
• number of visits being at the top position;
• conversion rates;
• approximate value of a contract.

Problem terms

This category of terms creates a lot of opportunities for B2B SaaS businesses that don’t have a widely-searched product category.

It makes it really hard for such companies to generate a list of solution-related terms. Therefore, the best option is to present your SaaS solution as a solution to specific issues that users face. 

Below, you may find several ways of how to make the most of problem terms.

Be specific and relevant

Don’t build your content around one topic only and with too broad problem terms. These factors won’t ensure high ranking in search results since Google doesn’t give topical authority to such kinds of sites.

When you’re going to make a list of problem terms, pay close attention to your topical authority, search volume, term’s difficulty, and whether the chosen term describes your product well.

Build pages dedicated to problems you solve

These pages can be blog articles describing the problem your product can deal with or just those describing your SaaS product features.

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Create a page with a tool showing your product feature

With regard to the problems with links mentioned above, it’s undoubtedly difficult to acquire them. However, you can create a small online tool and dedicate a page to it. 

This tool can describe one of your SaaS solution features and let your website visitors try it for free. 

Don’t forget to add a CTA describing a problem your prospects currently have and type in the search bar.

Upstream and downstream product terms

This category is also great if your product doesn’t belong to a widely-searched category.

The main idea of working with such terms is to get to know those that are used by well-established brands and which drive them a lot of traffic.

Here’s how to do this.

Make a list of right keywords

While creating a list of keywords to work with, try to define the following:

• which upstream and downstream products your target audience is searching for;
• how the market is segmented.

Create relevant landing pages

Before thinking of the good content for your landing pages, remember that when your prospects are searching for upstream and downstream products, they are not aware of the problems or solutions related to your product. They just initially represent your target audience.

Therefore, aim to build the content which will help your website visitors realize they have a problem. 

After that, move to describing your SaaS product as a solution for that problem.

Leverage Google Ads

As with alternative terms, it’s a good option to use Google ads to promote your brand focusing on upstream and downstream terms.

Due to the fact that your website has never contained those terms, it’ll not be a quick process for your company to rank high in Google search results. 

As it has been mentioned, Google Ads will drive initial traffic to your site and will help you gather the data necessary to plan your further strategy.

General terms

In case of working with general terms, you should focus your efforts on the content which would contain key search terms related to your target market.

Although this category allows you to build quite a huge list of keywords and has a big search volume, other categories tend to bring more results quicker. 

Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that you should ignore general terms at all. If you are able to put money and effort into your content for the long term, it will certainly pay off. Here are some steps to build your strategy around general terms:

• Define key topics for your content. Use a mix of keyword research and your company’s expertise to make your content relevant and high-ranking in search results.
• Try your best to write an interesting long-read in your blog. Enhance your texts with images, examples, check-lists, and case studies to make it more engaging for the reader.
• Use your long-read to build the presence on other websites and link to it from there. Split your long-read into smaller pieces to post on your social networks, your blogs, other blogs, etc.
• If it’s possible, build external links to it. Find people who wrote posts related to the same topic as yours and ask them to link to your article.

Final Thoughts

To sum up, no matter how big, prosperous, or famous your SaaS product is now, the keyword pyramid can help you discover opportunities you have never thought of. It helps to build an efficient keyword strategy that will yield a significant amount of traffic and customers to your company.

Just try to define where your business is and what peculiarities your product has, and find the best term categories for your keyword strategy. 

If you’re still not sure which category of terms to choose or how to better build your keyword bidding strategy, Teamedia is ready to help!